Summary: There have recently been widespread claims that Dickens’s working poor were better off than modern minimum-wage workers. Such comparisons rely on misleading inflation math and selective reading. The severe material deprivation of Victorian life—crowded housing, scarce possessions, and basic sanitation problems—dwarfs today’s standards. Modern Americans, even at the lower end of the income scale, enjoy far greater material comfort than the Cratchits ever did.

Christmas is often a time for nostalgia. We look back on our own childhood holidays. Songs and traditions from the past dominate the culture.

Nostalgia is not without its purposes. But it can also be misleading. Take those who view the material circumstances of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” as superior to our own.

Claims that an American today earning the minimum wage is worse off than the working poor of the 19th century have been popular since at least 2021. A recent post with thousands of likes reads:

Time for your annual reminder that, according to A Christmas Carol, Bob Cratchit makes 15 shillings a week. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $530.27/wk, $27,574/yr, or $13.50/ hr. Most Americans on minimum wage earn less than a Dickensian allegory for destitution.

This is humbug.

Consider how harsh living conditions were for a Victorian earning 15 shillings a week.

Dickens writes that Mr. Cratchit lives with his wife and six children in a four-room house. It is rare for modern residents of developed nations to crowd eight people into four rooms.

It was common in the Victorian era. According to Britain’s National Archives, a typical home had no more than four rooms. Worse yet, it lacked running water and a toilet. Entire streets (or more) would share a few toilets and a pump with water that was often polluted.

The Cratchit household has few possessions. Their glassware consists of merely “two tumblers, and a custard-cup without a handle.” For Christmas dinner, Mr. Cratchit wears “threadbare clothes” while his wife is “dressed out but poorly in a twice-turned gown.”

People used to turn clothing inside-out and alter the stitching to extend its lifespan. The practice predated the Victorian era, but continued into it. Eventually, clothes would become “napless, threadbare and tattered,” as the historian Emily Cockayne noted.

The Cratchits didn’t out-earn a modern American earning the minimum wage. Mr. Cratchit’s weekly salary of 15 shillings in 1843, the year “A Christmas Carol” was published, is equivalent to almost £122 in 2025. Converted to U.S. dollars, that’s about $160 a week, for an annual salary of $8,320.

The U.S. federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour or $15,080 per year for a full-time worker. That’s about half of what the meme claims Mr. Cratchit earned. Only 1% of U.S. workers earned the federal minimum wage or less last year. Most states set a higher minimum wage. The average worker earns considerably more. Clerks like Mr. Cratchit now earn an average annual salary of $49,210.

Mr. Cratchit couldn’t have purchased much of the modern “basket of goods” used in inflation calculations. Many of the basket’s items weren’t available in 1843. The U.K.’s Office of National Statistics recently added virtual reality headsets to it.

Another way to compare the relative situation of Mr. Cratchit and a minimum-wage worker today is to see how long it would take each of them to earn enough to buy something comparable. A BBC article notes that, according to an 1844 theatrical adaptation of “A Christmas Carol,” it would have taken Mr. Cratchit a week’s wages to purchase the trappings of a Christmas feast: “seven shillings for the goose, five for the pudding, and three for the onions, sage and oranges.” Mr. Cratchit opts for a goose for the family’s Christmas meal. A turkey—then a costlier option—was too expensive.

The American Farm Bureau Federation found that the ingredients for a turkey-centered holiday meal serving 10 people cost $55.18 in 2025. At the federal minimum wage, someone would need to work seven hours and 37 minutes to afford that feast.

A minimum-wage worker could earn more than enough in a single workday to purchase a meal far more lavish than the modest Christmas dinner that cost Mr. Cratchit an entire week’s pay. And the amount of time a person needs to work to afford a holiday meal has fallen dramatically for the average blue-collar worker in recent years despite inflation. Wages have grown faster than food prices.

There has been substantial progress in living conditions since the 1840s. We’re much better off than the Cratchits were. In fact, most people today enjoy far greater material comfort than did even Dickens’s rich miser Ebenezer Scrooge.

This article was originally published in the Wall Street Journal on 12/23/2025.

Summary: Despite widespread complaints about soaring grocery bills, Americans are spending far less of their working time to put food on the table than earlier generations did. Measured in time prices, long-term trends show food has grown more abundant thanks to rising wages. While household budgets face real pressures elsewhere, the idea of an unprecedented food-affordability crisis simply isn’t supported by the evidence.

With one big family-gathering meal out of the way and more soon to come (Christmas? New Year’s? Super Bowl?), let’s talk about food prices and the “affordability crisis” much in the news and in politicians’ rhetoric. Judging from polls, many Americans believe that the grocery prices are slipping out of reach. Inflation since 2021 left a mark on household budgets, but step back from the checkout line and look at the longer record. Measured the way people experience prices — through hours of work — food at home has become more affordable, not less.

Start with the relationship that matters: wages versus prices. Using Bureau of Labor Statistics data on blue-collar pay and the consumer price index for “Food at Home,” we can compare wage growth with grocery inflation over multiple time horizons. Over the past year, blue-collar wages rose 3.8 percent while supermarket prices rose 2.7 percent. Over the past two years, wages increased 8.1 percent compared with a 4 percent rise for food. Over 10 years, wages rose 49.5 percent, prices 29.7 percent. Over 30 years, wages climbed 169 percent, prices 111 percent. Over 50 years, wages rose 558 percent, food prices 403 percent.

Put differently, wages grew about 40 percent faster than food prices over the past year, with often higher jumps in the other annual comparisons. The longer the period, the larger the cumulative advantage for workers.

The most useful way to express this advantage, as we argued in our 2022 book “Superabundance,” is not in dollars but in “time prices.” Americans buy goods with money, but pay for them with time. To calculate a time price, divide the dollar price of a good by the hourly wage. The result is the number of minutes a worker must spend on the job to earn that good.

Applying this measure to the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual survey of the ingredients for a Thanksgiving meal serving 10 people — or any other similar holiday feast or special occasion, for that matter — reveals fascinating information about basic “affordability.”

In dollar terms, the Farm Bureau basket rose from $28.74 in 1986 to $55.18 in 2025, a 92 percent increase; over the same period, the blue-collar hourly wage rose from $8.92 to $31.33, a gain of 251 percent. Once you convert those figures into time prices, an even more reassuring picture emerges. In 1986, a blue-collar worker had to work 3.22 hours to buy that dinner for 10. By 2025, the same meal required 1.76 hours. The time price fell 45.3 percent. For the time increment required to buy that meal in 1986, a worker can now buy 1.83 of them — nearly doubling what the labor will buy. Food abundance for that worker rose 83 percent.

This reflects a broader pattern. U.S. consumers spent about 17 percent of disposable personal income on food in 1960; by 2019, that share had fallen to 9.5 percent, driven largely by more affordable food at home. Even after the inflation spike in recent years, Americans last year devoted 10.4 percent of disposable income to food, still roughly half the share common in the mid-20th century and lower than in most other countries. That is a textbook case of Engel’s law: As incomes rise, the share of income spent on food declines.

What produced these gains is not mysterious. Better seeds, fertilizers, machinery, transport, refrigeration, packaging, inventory management and data systems all raise agricultural productivity. Competition in retailing and global trade further push producers to deliver more nutrition for each hour of work on the demand side. The result shows up not only in fuller supermarket shelves but in long-run trends in wages, prices and time prices.

None of that denies the pressure that higher rents, insurance premiums or interest rates place on families. Nor does it imply that every household shares equally in the gains. Time prices capture the average worker, not the person between jobs or outside the labor force. Policy debates about safety nets, housing supply or tax burdens remain important.

But when political candidates and commentators claim that food has never been less affordable, the evidence does not support them. In terms of hours of work, the typical American must sacrifice less time than earlier generations to put groceries on the table. That’s worth celebrating in the holiday season.

This article was originally published in the Washington Post on 12/2/2025.

Summary: A famous grocery run in Home Alone appears to illustrate how much nominal prices have risen since the film came out in 1990. But a look at sticker prices alone misses the bigger picture. When costs are measured against what people earn, everyday food looks far more affordable than it once did. Thanks to rising nominal wages and ongoing innovation, modern households enjoy far greater abundance, even when nominal prices appear higher at first glance.

In the 1990 movie Home Alone, eight-year-old Kevin McCallister went grocery shopping. He bought a half gallon of milk, a half gallon of orange juice, a TV dinner, bread, frozen mac and cheese, laundry detergent, cling wrap, toilet paper, a pack of army men, and dryer sheets. His bill came to $19.83.

Professor Christopher Clarke at Washington State University does an annual price analysis of Kevin McCallister’s shopping basket and estimates that today’s price for those items would be around 114.5 percent higher ($42.54) than was the case in 1990. But, as my readers know quite well, things can become more expensive and more affordable at the same time. How is that possible? It’s possible because wages typically increase faster than prices. In the past 35 years, blue-collar hourly wages have increased by 207.7 percent, from $10.32 per hour in 1990 to $31.76 today.

Kevin’s basket in 1990, in time prices, would have cost 1.92 hours compared to 1.34 hours today. The time price of Kevin’s basket has fallen by 30.2 percent. For the time it took to earn the money to buy the basket of goods in 1990, you get 1.432 baskets today. Grocery abundance has increased by 43.2 percent.

If you got your first job in 1990 as an entry-level worker and have been upskilling for the past 35 years and are now an average worker, your hourly wage rate increased 511.3 percent: from $6.03 an hour in 1990 to $36.86 an hour today. Your grocery basket time price fell by 65 percent, giving you 2.86 baskets today. Your grocery abundance has increased by 186 percent.

In the movie, the McCallister family also orders 10 pizzas, and the bill comes to $122.50 (plus tip). That would put the time price for 1990s blue-collar workers at 11.87 hours, or about one hour and 11 minutes per pizza.

Professor Clarke did a price check on how much 10 classic cheese and pepperoni pizzas cost at a Little Caesars pizzeria near the McCallister’s home today—it comes to only $98.09 (plus tip). The nominal price has actually shrunk! That would put today’s time price at 3.08 hours for the 10 pizzas, or about 18.5 minutes per pizza. The time price has fallen by 74 percent. That means that for the time it took to earn the money to buy one pizza in 1990 you get 3.85 pizzas today. Pizza abundance has increased by 285 percent. If you are an upskilled worker, your pizza time price fell by 85.9 percent, giving you 7.1 pizzas today for the time price of 1 in 1990, thus increasing your abundance by 610 percent.

Hopefully you didn’t forget to count the kids before taking off on Christmas vacation this year! And remember, life can become more abundant every day if people are free to innovate.

Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.

Summary: A family group chat about Thanksgiving dinner reflects centuries of extraordinary advancement. The same journey that once separated families by months can now be made in hours. A meal that was once a rare luxury has become highly affordable. From instant communication to abundant food, everyday conveniences serve as a reminder that human ingenuity has transformed hardship into prosperity.

Two weeks before Thanksgiving, my sister sent a link to our family group chat. It wasn’t an RSVP form; it was closer to an online wedding gift registry. All the Thanksgiving classic foodstuffs were on the list—turkey, honey baked ham, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce, candied yams, green bean casserole, pumpkin pie, and more—each with a sign-up slot to commit to bringing the goods. This brief interaction represented numerous aspects of human progress, and I paused to take it in with awe and gratitude.

For one, I live in Boston, not far from where the original Thanksgiving Pilgrims settled in Plymouth, while my family lives in Los Angeles. The distance between us is almost identical to the distance between Britain and the New World, roughly 3,000 miles across land instead of ocean. Yet, the majority of Pilgrims never returned home and never even had the opportunity to stay in contact with the world they left behind. A letter across the Atlantic would cost days’ worth of wages and take months to arrive, if it found safe passage at all.

By the time the first Americans began settling in California in the 1840s, locomotives and the telegraph had been invented, but no transcontinental systems had yet been established. Most westward settlers knew they were signing up for a one-way journey taking many months, with high rates of death and disease. If they could maintain any contact with family on the other side of the continent, messages would take weeks via stagecoach. Even the extraordinarily speedy and expensive Pony Express system—with riders galloping nonstop at full speed, exchanging horses every 10-15 miles, and exchanging riders once or twice a day—still took 10 days to deliver messages across the country.

By the time the first transcontinental telegraph line was established in 1861, messages took minutes rather than weeks but were extraordinarily expensive—nearly a day’s average wage per word. Messages had to be brief and were largely reserved for the government, the military, and the ultra-wealthy. However, a decade later, the first transcontinental railroad was established, which, with the adoption of standardized domestic postage, meant most Americans could afford to send letters across the country and have them arrive within a week. Travel between Los Angeles and Boston became possible but still took weeks and cost several weeks’ worth of average wages.

Innovation accelerated even more rapidly during the 20th century with the invention and commercialization of telephones and air travel. By 1950, the luxuries of traveling between coasts in six hours and communicating across coasts in real time became possible. But these new services were still extraordinarily expensive. Transcontinental flights, both then and now, cost around $300; however, adjusted for inflation, a $300 flight in 1950 corresponds to well over $3,000 in today’s dollars. Likewise, while modern phone plans offer unlimited texts and calls for the equivalent of a few hours of the average minimum wage per month, transcontinental phone calls in the 1950s cost over $2.00 per minute, or over $27 per minute in today’s dollars. Only in the last 30 years, thanks to the economic engine of progress, did it become affordable for the average American to call long-distance for hours.

The technologies enabling long-distance communication and travel have improved immeasurably from the time of the Pilgrims.  That alone is reason enough to be thankful. But besides the amazing pocket-sized supercomputers and the satellite infrastructure that made my family’s group message possible, our exchange hinted at another amazing development that people often take for granted: food abundance.

My father grew up in a small Palestinian village in northern Israel, where most people were farmers. He was one of nine siblings and told stories of how chickens were slaughtered only on special occasions—red meat even rarer. A single bird was shared among a dozen people. “You were lucky if you got a drumstick,” my father said. Everything from feeding to slaughtering and plucking was done by hand. And without refrigeration, the meal had to be eaten at once.

By contrast, in the United States today, food is so cheap and plentiful that several relatives can volunteer to bring a whole turkey. At my local supermarket, frozen birds were recently on sale for $0.47 per pound. A 15-pound turkey, enough to feed a family, costs less than an hour’s minimum wage.

I am grateful for the world of superabundance, which has improved our lives and Thanksgiving holidays beyond what our ancestors could have dreamed. The fact that these interactions are commonplace enough to be taken for granted—communicating in real time across vast distances, flying across the country or around the world in hours, earning enough calories with a day’s wages to feed a family for a week—make our story of progress all the better.

This Thanksgiving, take a moment to consider how life has improved since the time of the Pilgrims. The food on your plate, the technology in your pocket, and the family who traveled long distances to be at the table were all made possible thanks to generations of compounding progress.